ZAG follows the ultra-clear "whiteboard overview" style of the author's first book, THE BRAND GAP, but drills deeper into the question of how brands can harness the power of differentiation. The author argues that in an extremely cluttered marketplace, traditional differentiation is no longer enough--today companies need "radical differentiation" to create lasting value for their shareholders and customers. In an entertaining 3-hour read you'll learn:- why me-too brands are doomed to fail- how to "read" customer feedback on new products and messages- the 17 steps for designing "difference" into your brand- how to turn your brand's "onliness" into a "trueline" to drive synergy- the secrets of naming products, services, and companies- the four deadly dangers faced by brand portfolios- how to "stretch" your brand without breaking it- how to succeed at all three stages of the competition cycleFrom the back cover: In an age of me-too products and instant communications, keeping up with the competition is no longer a winning strategy. Today you have to out-position, out-maneuver, and out-design the competition. The new rule? When everybody zigs, zag. In his first book, THE BRAND GAP, Neumeier showed companies how to bridge the distance between business strategy and design. In ZAG, he illustrates the number-one strategy of high-performance brands--radical differentiation.ZAG is an AIGA Design Press book, published under Peachpit's New Riders imprint in partnership with AIGA. For a quick peek inside ZAG, go to www.zagbook.com.

    Covey has taught to many of the world's top executives and most influential leaders. Align your organization's resources and structures to increase long-term performance and create a high-trust culture - the ultimate competitive advantage.

    This book helps supervisors and managers effectively communicate appreciation and encouragement to their employees, resulting in higher levels of job satisfaction, healthier relationships between managers and employees, and decreased cases of burnout. Ideal for both the profit and non-profit sectors, the principles presented in this book have a proven history of success in businesses, schools, medical offices, churches, and industry. Each book contains an access code for the reader to take a comprehensive online MBA Inventory (Motivating By Appreciation) - a $20 value.The inventory is designed to provide a clearer picture of an individual's primary language of appreciation and motivation as experienced in a work-related setting. It identifies individuals' preference in the languages of appreciation. Understanding an individual's primary and secondary languages of appreciation can assist managers and supervisors in communicating effectively to their team members.

    As newly appointed captain of the USS Santa Fe, a nuclear-powered submarine, he was responsible for more than a hundred sailors, deep in the sea. In this high-stress environment, where there is no margin for error, it was crucial his men did their job and did it well.But the ship was dogged by poor morale, poor performance, and the worst retention in the fleet. Marquet acted like any other captain until, one day, he unknowingly gave an impossible order, and his crew tried to follow it anyway. When he asked why the order wasn't challenged, the answer was "Because you told me to." Marquet realized he was leading in a culture of followers, and they were all in danger unless they fundamentally changed the way they did things. That's when Marquet took matters into his own hands and pushed for leadership at every level. Turn the Ship Around! is the true story of how the Santa Fe skyrocketed from worst to first in the fleet by challenging the U.S. Navy's traditional leader-follower approach. Struggling against his own instincts to take control, he instead achieved the vastly more powerful model of giving control. Before long, each member of Marquet's crew became a leader and assumed responsibility for everything he did, from clerical tasks to crucial combat decisions. The crew became fully engaged, contributing their full intellectual capacity every day, and the Santa Fe started winning awards and promoting a highly disproportionate number of officers to submarine command.No matter your business or position, you can apply Marquet's radical guidelines to turn your own ship around. The payoff: a workplace where everyone around you is taking responsibility for their actions, where people are healthier and happier, where everyone is a leader.

    This new edition includes the latest research and case studies, and offers inspiring new and relevant stories of real people achieving extraordinary results.

    What failed startups don't have are enough customers.Founders and employees fail to spend time thinking about (and working on) traction in the same way they work on building a product. This shortsighted approach has startups trying random tactics - some ads, a blog post or two - in an unstructured way that's guaranteed to fail. This book changes that. Traction Book provides startup founders and employees with the framework successful companies have used to get traction. It allows you to think about which marketing channels make sense for you, given your industry and company stage. This framework has been used by founders like Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia), Alexis Ohanian (Reddit), Paul English (Kayak.com), and Alex Pachikov (Evernote) to build some of the biggest companies and organizations in the world. We interviewed each of the above founders - along with 35+ others - and pulled out the repeatable tactics and strategies they used to get traction. We then cover every possible marketing channel you can use to get traction, and show you which channels will be your key to growth. This book shows you how to grow at a time when getting traction is more important than ever. Below are the channels we cover in the book:Viral Marketing Public Relations (PR) Unconventional PR Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Social and Display Ads Offline Ads Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Content Marketing Email Marketing Engineering as Marketing Target Market Blogs Business Development (BD) Sales Affiliate Programs Existing Platforms Trade Shows Offline Events Speaking Engagements Community BuildingThis book draws on interviews with the following individuals: Jimmy Wales, Co-founder of Wikipedia Alexis Ohanian, Co-founder of reddit Eric Ries, Author of The Lean Startup Rand Fishkin, Founder of SEOmoz Noah Kagan, Founder of AppSumo Patrick McKenzie, CEO of Bingo Card Creator Sam Yagan, Co-founder of OkCupid Andrew Chen, Investor at 500 Startups Justin Kan, Founder of Justin.tv Mark Cramer, CEO of SurfCanyon Colin Nederkoorn, CEO of Customer.io Jason Cohen, Founder of WP Engine Chris Fralic, Partner at First Round Paul English, CEO of Kayak.com Rob Walling, Founder of MicroConf Brian Riley, Co-founder of SlidePad Steve Welch, Co-founder of DreamIt Jason Kincaid, Blogger at TechCrunch Nikhil Sethi, Founder of Adaptly Rick Perreault, CEO of Unbounce Alex Pachikov, Co-founder of Evernote David Skok, Partner at Matrix Ashish Kundra, CEO of myZamana David Hauser, Founder of Grasshopper Matt Monahan, CEO of Inflection Jeff Atwood, Co-founder of Discourse Dan Martell, CEO of Clarity.fm Chris McCann, Founder of StartupDigest Ryan Holiday, Exec at American Apparel Todd Vollmer, Enterprise Sales Veteran Sandi MacPherson, Founder of Quibb Andrew Warner, Founder of Mixergy Sean Murphy, Founder of SKMurphy Satish Dharmaraj, Partner at Redpoint Garry Tan, Partner at Y Combinator Steve Barsh, CEO of Packlate Michael Bodekaer, Co-founder of Smart Launch Zack Linford, Founder of Optimozo

    This innovation advantage will translate into a premium in your company’s stock price—an innovation premium—which is possible only by building the code for innovation right into your organization’s people, processes, and guiding philosophies.Practical and provocative, The Innovator’s DNA is an essential resource for individuals and teams who want to strengthen their innovative prowess.

    Not only is the cliché flawed-preexisting passions are rare and have little to do with how most people end up loving their work-but it can also be dangerous, leading to anxiety and chronic job hopping.After making his case against passion, Newport sets out on a quest to discover the reality of how people end up loving what they do. Spending time with organic farmers, venture capitalists, screenwriters, freelance computer programmers, and others who admitted to deriving great satisfaction from their work, Newport uncovers the strategies they used and the pitfalls they avoided in developing their compelling careers.Matching your job to a preexisting passion does not matter, he reveals. Passion comes after you put in the hard work to become excellent at something valuable, not before. In other words, what you do for a living is much less important than how you do it.With a title taken from the comedian Steve Martin, who once said his advice for aspiring entertainers was to "be so good they can't ignore you," Cal Newport's clearly written manifesto is mandatory reading for anyone fretting about what to do with their life, or frustrated by their current job situation and eager to find a fresh new way to take control of their livelihood. He provides an evidence-based blueprint for creating work you love.So Good They Can't Ignore You will change the way we think about our careers, happiness, and the crafting of a remarkable life.

    At its root, the principle works like this: Like Dorothy and the gang in The Wizard of Oz, most businesspeople have the tools to succeed, but when things go wrong they blame circumstance or others instead of looking within for the true cause of unsatisfactory results. Once individuals learn to accept responsibility, they can use the Oz Principle to become better leaders. Now, with corporate scandals in the headlines and the culture of victimization running rampant at every level of the business world, Roger Connors, Tom Smith, and Craig Hickman return with a new edition of The Oz Principle. Fully revised, this edition will update the statistics, concepts, and relevant companies through fresh, timely anecdotes and stories.

    However well intentioned they may be, leaders who deceive themselves always end up undermining their own performance.This straightforward book explains how leaders can discover their own self-deceptions and learn how to escape destructive patterns. The authors demonstrate that breaking out of these patterns leads to improved teamwork, commitment, trust, communication, motivation, and leadership.

    Reveals how to run an online business profitably in spite of the Internet's inherently free culture, disseminating the principles of a ''priceless economy'' in six categories that pertain to advertising, labor exchange, and advanced-version fees.

    Silicon Valley is filled with garage-to-riches stories and hot young entrepreneurs with big ideas. Yet even in this place where the exceptional is common, Randy Komisar is a breed apart. Currently a "Virtual CEO" who provides "leadership on demand" for several renowned companies, Komisar was recently described by the "Washington Post" as a "combined professional mentor, minister without portfolio, in-your-face investor, trouble-shooter and door opener." But even more interesting than what he does is how - and why - he does it. Komisar has found a way to turn an ambitious and challenging work life into his life's work."The Monk and the Riddle" is unlike any other business book you've read. Transcending the typical "leadership book" model of lists and frameworks on how to succeed in business, "The Monk and the Riddle" is instead a lively and humorous narrative about the education of a unique Valley insider. It unfolds over the course of an ongoing dialogue between Komisar and would-be entrepreneurs, "Lenny and Allison," and is at once a portal into the inner workings of Silicon Valley - from how startups get launched to how venture capitalists do their deals to how plans get prepared and pitched - and a deeply personal account of how one mover and shaker found fulfillment, not in work's rewards but in work itself.As the narrative follows Komisar through meetings with venture capitalists and eager entrepreneurs, and as his conversations with Lenny evolve toward a resolution, "The Monk and the Riddle" imparts invaluable lessons about the differences between leadership and management and passion and drive, and about the meaning of professional and personal success. "When all is said and done," writes Komisar, "the journey is the reward."

    Long-term commitment to new learning and new philosophy is required of any management that seeks transformation. The timid and the fainthearted, and the people that expect quick results, are doomed to disappointment.According to W. Edwards Deming, American companies require nothing less than a transformation of management style and of governmental relations with industry. In Out of the Crisis, originally published in 1982, Deming offers a theory of management based on his famous 14 Points for Management. Management's failure to plan for the future, he claims, brings about loss of market, which brings about loss of jobs. Management must be judged not only by the quarterly dividend, but by innovative plans to stay in business, protect investment, ensure future dividends, and provide more jobs through improved product and service. In simple, direct language, he explains the principles of management transformation and how to apply them.Previously published by MIT-CAES

    --Julie Bick, best-selling author of ALL I REALLY NEED TO KNOW IN BUSINESS I LEARNED AT MICROSOFT. Enlivened by witty anecdotes, THE MCKINSEY WAY contains valuable lessons on widely diverse topics such as marketing, interviewing, team-building, and brainstorming. --Paul H. Zipkin, Vice-Dean, The Fuqua School of BusinessIt's been called a breeding ground for gurus. McKinsey & Company is the gold-standard consulting firm whose alumni include titans such as In Search of Excellence author Tom Peters, Harvey Golub of American Express, and Japan's Kenichi Ohmae.When Fortune 100 corporations are stymied, it's the McKinsey-ites whom they call for help. In THE MCKINSEY WAY, former McKinsey associate Ethan Rasiel lifts the veil to show you how the secretive McKinsey works its magic, and helps you emulate the firm's well-honed practices in problem solving, communication, and management.He shows you how McKinsey-ites think about business problems and how they work at solving them, explaining the way McKinsey approaches every aspect of a task: How McKinsey recruits and molds its elite consultants; How to sell without selling; How to use facts, not fear them; Techniques to jump-start research and make brainstorming more productive; How to build and keep a team at the top its game; Powerful presentation methods, including the famous waterfall chart, rarely seen outside McKinsey; How to get ultimate buy-in to your findings; Survival tips for working in high-pressure organizations.Both a behind-the-scenes look at one of the most admired and secretive companies in the business world and a toolkit of problem-solving techniques without peer, THE MCKINSEY WAY is fascinating reading that empowers every business decision maker to become a better strategic player in any organization.

    Mountains of print have been written about culture. Loonshots identifies the small shifts in structure that control this transition, the same way that temperature controls the change from water to ice.Using examples that range from the spread of fires in forests to the hunt for terrorists online, and stories of thieves and geniuses and kings, Bahcall shows how this new kind of science helps us understand the behavior of companies and the fate of empires. Loonshots distills these insights into lessons for creatives, entrepreneurs, and visionaries everywhere.